by Lois Leveen
“Even counts and princes cannot turn themselves into statues,” I say, thinking Tybalt is confused by the tombs of the Scaligeri, which rise high above the churchyard of Santa Maria Antica, each with a sculpted likeness of the man whose remains it covers. The sarcophagus of Cangrande I is topped with a statue of the prince astride his horse, his sword sticking up from his lap in such a way that Pietro snickers whenever he passes it, saying all of Verona can see in that extended member why Cangrande I was called the big dog.
“This one can,” Tybalt insists. “After he shook his last piss drops off, he turned like marble down there. I shook myself and tried to turn to stone, too. But I could not.”
I cannot help but smile at the idea of Mercutio swinging his little manhood at Tybalt like a miniature version of the rock-hard sword sported by the death-statue of Cangrande I. It’s welcome relief after all the terror of the brawl to laugh at the way small boys tease each other.
As we walk back to the city gates, Pietro provides the talk that Tybalt’s father is too far off to give. If only we could pass a ram tipping its ewe, or a mastiff mounting a bitch in heat. But you never happen upon those things when they are most convenient, and so Pietro gestures wildly to illustrate his explanations. Though I walk a little ways off in the hope Tybalt might forget that Juliet and I are here at all, I mark the way he tilts his ear, struggling to understand what turns a man hard as stone, and softens him back up again.
To me, those things are far easier to grasp than what would bring youth not half a dozen years older than Tybalt and Mercutio to such bloody conflict, leaving the campo trampled, the palio-race unrun, and who knows how many innocents hurt or killed.
FIVE
Shad, eel, perch, carp, pike, trout. Pickled, salted, smoked, breaded and fried. In the forty meatless, milkless days of Lent, the cook dishes up so much fish for the Cappelletti, I swim the Adige in my dreams. I visit whole underwater kingdoms as I sleep, a twitch of what are no longer my human hips sending me gliding headlong through mysterious dark channels. My scales shimmer in the cool rush of river-water, and I want to stay weightless and submerged forever. Until the night between Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, when a whole herd of gaping-eyed sea monsters chase me in my sleep, sinking fangs into my guts as I struggle to swim free. I wake gasping for air, beached on Juliet’s big bed.
I need to relieve myself. There is a filth bucket beside the bed, where I’m meant to empty my bladder and bowels. But I just dumped and scrubbed the bucket after supper. Rather than soil it again so soon, I make my way through the dark sala to the privy closet in the antecamera outside Lord and Lady Cappelletti’s bedchamber. It’s the first private necessary I’ve ever seen, and I sneak into it whenever I can. Shutting myself inside I always feel, if not like a queen upon a throne, at least like a fat hen on her roost. It holds the cleanest waste pot in the house, the maid hauling off the contents three times a day. Which you’d think is often enough.
Yet as I approach the door, the stink wrenches my stomach halfway to my mouth. Lord Cappelletto must have filled the privy with who knows what ill-humorous excretions. Surely I’d do better to go back to my own bucket.
But then I hear the whimpers. Small, wounded sounds, more of fear than physical hurt. A noise I first heard from a neighbor’s puppy, not at the moment my father smacked it hard between the eyes for digging in our field but when, seeing the stick swung high once more, the animal sensed it was about to be struck again.
Pushing open the door, I realize the stench is not of piss or shit. It’s rot. The fetid rot of human flesh, which hung so heavy during the great pestilence that no one who lived then can ever forget it. It’s coming not from the high-sided privy pot, but from Lady Cappelletta, who lies curled into a sweat-soaked ball on the cold floor.
This is my luck, to escape sea monsters in my sleep only to wake to this.
I kneel in the doorway, one hand covering my nose and mouth, the other gently pulling free the thick locks of Lady Cappelletta’s hair, on which she’s sucking.
“I reek,” she says.
It is so true, I do not bother to disagree. “Where is the pain?”
“Gone. Since last week.”
“A week past, and you’ve not yet sent for the midwife?”
“Lord Cappelletto calls for the midwife, when it is my time.” Her eyes swim up, then down, uncertain. “Is it my time?”
Fifteen and lady of a grand house, yet she’s still more of a child than I ever had the chance to be. Already delivered of a daughter, she knows less of bodily things than I did even before my first babe quickened in me. I’d tended a herd. Watching my flocklings tup then lamb, I formed some vague understanding of the relationship between the two. Learned, from watching, all the troubles there were to worry over. I saw lambs come out feet first. Or two-headed. Or, twisted up within a bleating, terrified mother, not at all.
“If you’re in pain, the midwife should come.”
“But I’m not in pain, not since last week.”
“That is when she should have come. Now it may be too—” I catch myself. What use is there in lecturing? I lay a careful hand across the rise of her belly. “Has it moved since then?”
She shakes her head, keeping her eyes from mine.
It’s not that she does not know. It’s that she’ll not admit to herself what she knows.
“And the smell, when did that start?”
“Just the last day.”
“Have you bled?” I ask, and she nods. “But nothing else has come out?”
She cocks her head at me, like a slow-witted horse.
I try to make my words gentle, but what is the use? “It needs to come out of you.”
“They die if they come out too early, that is what my sister told me when she gave me my bridal-chamber instruction. I must keep it in me. Lord Cappelletto needs his heir.”
A privy closet is no place for prolonged debate, especially when its inhabitant is putrid. And too terrified to understand what’s happening to her. I brush Lady Cappelletta’s feverish cheek, wondering how long she’s hidden here trying to deny the death inside her. This is the difference between us. I lost an infant I’d not even known I carried. She carries an infant she’ll not admit is lost. The two of us, huddling with our separate griefs in this tight space.
“Lord Cappelletto waited this late to marry,” I say. “He can wait a little longer to make a son.”
“He did not wait. He had sons.” Her voice drops. “It is not his fault if I cannot make a healthy boy. His first wife gave him three sons, before she ever had a daughter, as he likes to remind me. He still calls for her in his sleep, thirteen years after the plague took them all.”
I slump onto my heels, feeling the weight of what Lord Cappelletto survived. To lose all one’s children, this most terrible grief I know too well. But to endure it alone—that I cannot imagine. I would have thrown myself into the same shallow grave that swallowed my sons if Pietro had not held so tight to me, his grief as great as mine. I can only pity Lord Cappelletto for whatever twisted curse of luck kept him alone alive. And Lady Cappelletta—though she’d hardly been out of infant swaddling when the plague ravaged Verona, the ghost of it yet hovers over her marriage bed, festering its way inside her.
“The midwife must come, and maybe a surgeon, too.” What more can I say to make her understand? “It’s already dead, and must come out of you. To be buried, like his others.” I add the last part in the hope of convincing her that Lord Cappelletto will be moved to sympathy by this new loss. But we both know her dead issue cannot be buried in his family tomb, or any consecrated ground, its unbaptized soul condemned to who knows what eternal fate.
She grabs my hand, crushing my fingers with a surprising fury. “She took it. I know she did.” She speaks with a lunatic’s urgency. “I hate her.”
“Who?”
“Juliet.”
What is she saying in her madness? “She’s just an infant.”
“Not the brat, the othe
r one. The one he named her for. His dead wife. I hear it every night: Juliet, most cherished, departed mother. Even in his sleep he taunts me with it, to remind me of what I’m not.”
So this is why she loathes my Juliet. A treasured jewel named for a wife Lord Cappelletto may have truly loved, the mother of all he’d lost. All the things he’s given my dearest lamb—ivory-inlaid cradle, pearl-trimmed cap, grandly godfathered christening-day—such weak talismans against what he and I and everyone who lived through that awful time knows can so quickly snatch breath and life and joy away.
When death decides to come, neither wealth nor piety can stop it. We know this, and yet we bargain with our saints and ourselves, every moment of every day trying to deny the one great truth of life: loss. It is a fool’s bargain, but still we make it.
“You are his living wife,” I remind her, “and you’ve given him his only living child.” Given me my only living child as well. A child I need to protect. Protect even—especially—from Lady Cappelletta. “Let them take what stinks of him from you. As long as you survive, that is all that matters.”
She gives the slightest nod and eases her grip on me. I fold her fingers around the garnet-studded cross that hangs on a thick chain around her thin neck, to give her something to hold to once I leave her.
She slips the bejeweled cross-piece into her mouth, sucking like a child and rocking herself back and forth. Unsound body, unsound mind. You need not be a midwife or a physick to know which is the harder to salve. I unbend myself, my legs tingling and unsteady as I go to wake Lord Cappelletto.
When I part the curtain around their marriage bed, I see in his sleep-softened face some tender thing I’ve never before noticed in him. Not so gentle-hearted a man as my Pietro, but one more touched by sentiment than I’d thought Lord Cappelletto to be. A frescoed Virgin covers the wall beside the bed, watching over him like a doting mother over her own slumbering son.
But where care lodges, sleep cannot long lie. I shake him awake. As he makes out my face, he grunts with alarm. “Juliet?”
“Juliet is fine. But Lady Cappelletta—”
“Is it the child she is carrying?”
It’s true, this wife means no more to him than the pried-open oyster means to the man that seizes a pearl. Or the man who, seeking a pearl, finds none. “The child is already gone.”
The softness sags out of his face, and I recognize the same old man who was too superstitious to visit the confinement room.
Before I can say more, he slips from the bed and kneels beneath the painting of the Holy Madonna, grabbing my arm and pulling me down beside him. His insistence startles me, until I think of how many nights, and days, he must have knelt alone after losing his first Juliet and all their little ones. Word for word I match his prayers, taking comfort in our nearness as we implore the Blessed Maria to keep safe the soul of his never-to-be born babe, along with the many souls of those others taken from us. All our plague-dead children. His first, beloved wife. And Susanna, my terrible fresh loss. Almost too much to bear, such doubled and trebled grief, until I utter that one comfort, the name of our living love. The two of us entreat the Sainted Virgin to keep little Juliet with us and well. “And Lady Cappelletta, too,” I say, crossing myself and waiting for Lord Cappelletto to do the same.
He does, calling her Emiliana. It’s the first time I hear her Christian name. Those pretty syllables seem to shimmer from his stale-breathed mouth. He calls on Santa Margherita, and the Virgin Mother, on his own patron saint and on Lady Cappelletta’s too, praying she will prove fecund. I know that whether we fare well or ill, it’s only by the saints’ intervening grace, and even the apothecaries will tell you the Pater Noster and Ave Maria are the surest cure. But how long ought a man keep beseeching the heavens to let his wife birth new life, while she lies alone and terrified within a privy closet? I give off a little cough, interrupting Lord Cappelletto long enough to squeeze in a quick amen and hoist myself to my feet.
“Amen,” he repeats, rising and calling for the page to fetch Verona’s most respected midwife, to rid Lady Cappelletta of what she’s lost.
Prince Cansignorio and his household ride on horseback at the head of the Easter procession, while all the rest of Verona walks. Or nearly all. Lord Cappelletto strides. Having maneuvered his way to a position right behind the prince’s family, Lord Cappelletto wears an expression I first caught sight of while peering out from behind my mother’s skirts when Luca Covoni, who owned our village, came to collect my father’s rent. A tightness around the jaw to convey impatience at being bothered with such petty matters, a tightness that barely masks what shows in the darting, bulging eyes: a deep sense of pleased possession, as though Covoni owned not just the land, but all of us who lived and labored on it. Striding in the wake of the Scaligeri horses, his vair-lined velvet robe secured by a broad silver belt that wraps twice around his great girth before dangling nearly to the street-stones, Lord Cappelletto exudes the same entitled air, but with an assurance that a man like Luca Covoni, whose hems remained caked with manure from the fields and dirt from our peasant floors, never had.
Tybalt and I follow like a pair of pack-donkeys, me bearing Juliet and Tybalt carrying the silver chalice that will be the Cappelletti’s paschal offering. Both held so high that every noble family who walks behind us, and all the less-than-nobles who line Verona’s streets to watch the grand procession, see them.
Lord Cappelletto’s tasseled hat has slid to one side, revealing his balding pate. Tybalt giggles at the way the glinting sun dances on the sweat that slicks that feeble, hairless spot. But no one else is close enough to notice. And if anyone wonders at the absence of Lady Cappelletta, surely they cannot imagine the state she’s in. From the time the midwife arrived with her hooks and pliers, not all the aqua vitae in the city could quiet Lady Cappelletta’s screams. I glugged back a good quantity myself in the hopes it might at least dull my hearing, but it’s been no help. I’ve kept Juliet and Tybalt as far from her as I can, though in truth there’s no place in all Ca’ Cappelletti where her maddened howls do not reach.
But passing outside the compound’s walls brings me no solace. A dozen brutal fights have bloodied Verona’s stone-paved streets since the palio-day riot. I’ve not left Ca’ Cappelletti during these deadly weeks, and now the slightest jostling from those behind us in the cortege, or the press of the crowd watching us pass, shimmers fear across my back. As the trumpets heralding the prince sound against the buildings that line our route, I’d swear I hear in their reverberations some echo of cursing and crossed swords. The silver chalice flashes like an upraised dagger, and with every turn we make, I wrap myself tighter around Juliet, certain the day’s uneasy peace is about to burst.
Following so close to Prince Cansignorio offers faint comfort. Several years shy of thirty, he’s barely older than the palio-day brawlers and, it seems, no wiser. Lacking his brother’s lust for control, he’s not bothered to quell the violence. Mayhap he believes that as long as Verona’s bloodthirsty youth are killing one another, they’ll be too busy to raise a blade against him. Though the city is in want of peace, he offers only a grand show of his own supposed piety, pledging a thousand candles to each church and chapel in the city. He leads the Easter procession on a three-hour circuit for all Verona to witness his enormous waxy offering, as though we are too stupid to realize that princes pay their tithes out of poor men’s taxes.
At last, we reach the Duomo. As we face the rippled marble columns framing the cathedral’s entry, the crowd sways before its arches and peaks, its windows carved with more beasts than Noah could’ve fit within a fleet of arks. I wish I could set my rump upon one of the stone griffins flanking the door and settle Juliet onto my lap, for at eight months she’s grown heavy as a good-sized sack of grain. But what do Cansignorio or Il Benedicto care for a woman’s suffering? Neither of them offer any balm for my throbbing feet and aching shoulders, as they stand in the shade of the cathedral, taking long turns addressing the crowd. Ble
ssed, the poor are told they are, though not a one of them—with their dirt-streaked nails, callused hands, and bodies still bent from whatever toil swallows the other six days of their week—will gain entrance to the Duomo. Not today, a day so sanctified that prince, counts, lords, and all the new-moneyed merchants turn out in their finest silks and furs, velvets and jewels, to command places in the cathedral. It is Easter. Christ is risen, and so are the profits of every fabric dealer and goldsmith in the city.
I wonder where Pietro might be among the gathering. This was the one hope I carried when I left Ca’ Cappelletti: that he and I would find some way to find each other. Foolish wish. For how can I tell if my husband is one of the tens of thousands of people crowding the streets that fan out from the Duomo, when I face only the back of Lord Cappelletto’s balding head and the Scaligeri horses’ behinds?
The prince’s nephews ride two astride the same horse, a broad black beast that, as if to add an amen to Il Benedicto’s final blessing of the crowd, lifts its tail and looses a mound of slick, brown dumplings onto the cathedral steps. The younger of the boys, the one called Mercutio, digs a quick heel into the horse’s flank. The beast turns sideways just as the liveryman steps forward to lift the child from the horse. Swinging his far leg across the animal’s hindquarter, Count Mercutio thrusts himself into the liveryman’s arms with such force the servant stumbles back into the steaming turds. Sliding across the mound, he loses his grip on the boy, who manages to crash, hands outstretched, into the ample bosom of the bishop’s niece.
Surely the liveryman will be put out from service, and probably from the city walls, for such clumsiness, though I see it’s all the boy’s doing, a prank to amuse himself during the solemn monotony of Easter morning. Tybalt stares at Count Mercutio, worry edging his face. Count Paris, the prince’s other nephew, still atop the horse and clutching its mane to keep from tumbling off, mirrors Tybalt’s expression. As though each of them knows that while this bit of Mercutio’s fun is at the liveryman’s expense, next time it might be at theirs.